Hybrid Converter With Alternate Common Arm and Director Thyristors for High-Power Capability

This paper presents the basic operating principles of a new hybrid converter that combines thyristors and full-bridge (FB) arms for achieving high active-power capability. This converter consists of a modular multilevel converter (MMC) equipped with additional common arms, which alternate between the upper and lower dc poles. This alternation is achieved by the thyristors that are utilized as director switches and allow the parallel connection of the common arms and the arms of the MMC. The main contributions of this paper are the analysis of the operating principles, the simulation verification of the functionality of the proposed converter, and the comparison of the latter with the full-bridge modular multilevel converter (FB-MMC).